


Absence

by ValmureEld



Series: Venom Was a Good Film Fight Me [1]
Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Creature POV, Experiment, First Person, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Sort Of, Symbiotic Relationship, Venom POV, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-27 21:51:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16228025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ValmureEld/pseuds/ValmureEld
Summary: The absence of a good host is no mere annoyance to a symbiote--the empty world is agony and the wrong host is worse.





	Absence

**Author's Note:**

> So I saw Venom and myself and a friend were discussing what it must be like to learn how to have a body, or be rejected by a body.

I am awake and I am hurting. It is cold and the sounds of this world pierce me. Low sounds that press down on me and remind me that I am not made to breathe, that I do not breathe.

I need something this world cannot give me. High sounds that slice and ache, medium sounds that grind into me with a grit and a bite and a….a _snap_.

I am cold, and moving is rough then smooth then I am sinking between gaps in this rough, filthy world and maybe leaving pieces of myself behind. A film builds inside of me and I cannot even focus to purge it because my awareness is flickering. I am starving for a breath and do not know how to create lungs for myself. I need help. I need it to end.

I am afraid in the dark and in the cold and I long for heat. I am drawn to warmth. Warmth is my light in this void and I move towards it.

A bundle of warmth that turns into wires and the false life of whirring discs. A sheet of warmth that only buzzes with an electricity that makes my molecules shiver and itch.

Dead. Dead, _dead_ **_dead it’s ALL DEAD!_**

I am rabid and unable to think anymore when I finally touch something alive and I hurl myself into it with a spasm that turns into convulsions.

The pain is overwhelming, and if I wasn’t so busy gasping the deepest breaths I can into my stolen lungs I would have rejected this wrongness outright. Everything is fighting me. The host is panicked, the mind bludgeoning against mine with a foaming, desperate intensity. I withdraw into the chest, wrap around the lungs, thread through the heart and into the stomach where at least I can stop shivering.

It is soon too warm, and I am riddled with a prickling pain that only grows worse as the body rejects me. I try to smooth down the inflammation, quiet the heart, but my host only thrashes harder and I know I am trying to force a melding that is never going to work. I ache and feel sick and every new integration I manage breaks off three others.

I am dying, I am throbbing and I cannot take it any longer so I lash out, cleaving a chunk of the liver, the heart, the diaphragm away to strengthen myself and finally create some quiet. My host shudders under my assault and goes slack in her restraints and I take a few more gasping breaths through her mouth before I force my way into her guard.

He is not much better, but he’s in too much shock to fight me immediately. I wind myself through his bones, holding onto them in a moment of frozen peace before his body senses my invasion and I suffer a fresh assault.

It doesn’t come right away, but I know it will and so I drive my host out of the cell with clumsy commands, stumbling on shaking legs to the hall where I desperately look for someone, anyone else I can shelter inside. I cannot go back to the cold, piercing bareness of _alone_ but this is not much better. The voice as he screams causes me to bristle and I crush his windpipe, shred his vocal chords in my desperation to _**get out.**_

From host to host I scramble, the vibrations of each panicked heart stacking up with each other until I am shuddering with it. I am a mass of confusion and pain, and it doesn’t take long before jumping hosts has exhausted me. The last one is standing near someone else, and in my desperation not to fade I wrap my arms around the other human and hold tight, dissolving the organs in my host in one ravenous draw before fleeing the corpse. The person I settle inside next is in too much shock as her colleague slips lifeless to the ground and she does nothing but stand there and cry. I pool, exhausted, in her muscles, and I sleep fitfully for a few swishing moments.

Each body I choose crumbles around me and I am so overwhelmed with the adrenaline and the tremors of fear that I almost go back to the suffocation of the open atmosphere.

I am barely aware when I am offered a new host, and for seven long days her body and I fight for dominance. Her fever rages, then abates. I try to talk to her and she shuts herself off. I prod her for food, clawing at the glowing filaments of her nervous system for a reaction.

She either screams or sits silent.

I am barely aware, dozing to escape this new state of constant ache when I am jostled by a flood of adrenaline that bristles and burns. I can feel each shudder like a spike as she pounds against the cell, but this time someone is pounding back.

He breaks the glass, and with a flicker of sudden, cold clarity, I take control, rushing him. He falls, he is pleading, but I can feel nothing but a hum of a healthy nervous system, the beckoning of a body that isn’t already half shredded by fear.

I sink into him and it is the easiest thing since I came into existence.

 _Immediately_ , my pain goes quiet.

His pain spikes, his panic spikes, and I sense a threat to my host. No. _NO. HE IS MINE._

I fight for him, and though his fear rages and surges, I get him safe and his fear is not of me. He doesn’t even know I am here, and as he finally begins to calm I can hear the presence of his mind.

I know his name now. _Eddie_.

_Mine, Eddie._

I lay in his muscles, sink into his blood, and drape myself on the pleasant warmth of his bones. His heart is strong, and level, and the cadence of the sounds it makes are like morphine.

I fall asleep cradled by his diaphragm as he breathes in...and out…..in deeply, steadily, infusing his blood, infusing me with the oxygen I cannot process alone. I feel safe behind thick ribs and hot muscle.

I melt into him and everything is blissfully muffled outside.

When I wake, I am s t a r v i n g.

The pain comes back after that. Everything is dead! EVERYTHING IS DEAD AND I WILL NOT LEAVE AGAIN.

I chew away at his heart, his liver, desperate for sustenance and angry all the same. I thread myself into his heart, braiding into the muscle with a whisper, helping signal each pump.

Keep him alive. Keep myself alive. I hate that I must weaken him to stay.

There is so much here, so many things needed just to keep him alive. I hadn’t been able to feel it, in the others. They fought me too soon, too strongly. Eddie is fighting me too, but he answers when I call and his chest cavity is a familiar, comfortable fit. I will not give him up so easily, not when his breathing gives me painless awareness and his flesh drowns the outside.

Humans are so complicated. I begin to reach out with my essence alone, the thought of damaging his constellation, his rootwork of nerves and arteries something I am not willing to learn how to fix just yet.

I will not risk damaging the perfect host.

We are warm when he begins to quiet. And then he tries to tear me out! To damage us, and this human accuses me of killing him.

 _Killing him?!_ I have spent hours pacing his body, learning its scars and its damages, feeling the hum of electricity as it sparks through his spine. Pacing his heart for him, strengthening his diaphragm and settling in the corridor of his lungs. I have been studying him, fixing him with each scrap of energy I manage to harvest like a desperate survivor, loathe to have my perfect shelter fall apart around me.

Gradually, he speaks back, we eat, and I can restore the fullness of our heart as I withdraw and bask in its resonance again. I caress the strength of the muscle and rest once more in our diaphragm, draping myself lazily into the arteries where the pressure and pulse of blood no longer boiling with fever soothes my frayed edges.

The next time we are hurt, I know quickly how to fix us.


End file.
